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Crimson Wool's avatar

> Today’s science fiction authors also know better than to say such things directly, but it is really what many of them think: our tech future is predictable, but our social future is not, because physical science exists and social science does not.

At the risk of being extremely late to the party: isn't it true that our tech future is much more predictable than our social future?

Consider the hypothetical that Adolf Hitler or Lenin died in 1901; the history of the 20th century would look vastly different, with incomprehensible numbers of ripple effects on the present. Whereas, if Einstein or Bessemer had never been born, it is hard to believe that we would never have hit upon general relativity or the mass production of steel.

The social future is, in fact, difficult to predict because of chaos theory. Which individuals live or die and at what times is effectively randomly distributed, but individuals can have enormous impact on the future. The technological future is difficult to predict too, but more because it contains problems without known solutions - e.g. how to physically construct a space elevator, or how to construct a theory that accurately merges quantum mechanics and general relativity - rather than because of small changes in initial conditions leading to increasingly large and unpredictable changes.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Look, I think the other greatest SF writer in the world had it right in some senses (OK, probably more than some, but I'll digress). Remember way back in the foundation series, Lije Bailey goes off world and immediately asks to see a Socialolgist. THere isn't one, but there's an amateur who's making his own science as he goes along, but Lije, a simple policeman no less, is accustomed to sociaologists having verifyable scientifically deduced and statistically validated emprical evidence about why folk do stuff. Psychology also in Lije's Caves of Steel home town is indeed considered a very "hard" science with massive mathematical constructions explaing pretty well everything, Daneel eventually helps Harry Seldon come up with Psychohistory a mthematical model for predicting the future in large groups very precisely. I think we are that the point that the off-world amateur was at now, these sciences still seem "soft" to physicists etc, but due to the increasing pressure to be properly scientific they are evolving, and none of them have fundamentally undone their own existance in the process, the rise of psychology , anthopology etc in the world of business proves their Darwinian survival value, and I think in time (though I may seem cynical) people will prove a lot easier to predict and explain than all that wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff the physics and quantum physics folk are trying to figure out now. Cos people are essentially quite simple and unchaging once you understand their origins and thus their logic chains, but I feel a digression in the wings and I'm hungry.. Plus I think it's time to re-read caves of steel. Where did I put that.....

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